A Network Operations Center (NOC) is associated with one or more locations that provide network monitoring, control and manages for a computer, telecommunication or satellite network. With respect to telecommunications, NOCs are responsible for monitoring power failures, communication line alarms such as a bit errors, and other performance issues that may affect the network.
Quality of Experience (QoE) is a measure of the overall level of customer satisfaction with a service. QoE focuses on a service experience associated with a service provider. The measurement of Quality of Experience (QoE) is a challenge for service providers such as wireless carriers. QoE requires satisfying the growing demand for secure, fast, and reliable connections. For example, emergency services, commercial, and residential services depend on consistent user experience while using a wireless network.
At any given time, a large number of calls are occurring concurrently impacting the Quality of Experience (QoE). A centralized Network Operations Center (NOC) must have full visibility and comprehensive understanding of events, alerts, and metrics impacting the user experience.
For example, signal strength varies from one location to another due to the distance from the tower, multipath fading, physical objects (e.g., buildings, concrete, steel), radio frequency interference, electrical interference, and environmental factors (e.g., weather conditions). Therefore, the data throughput, call performance, and stream quality are susceptible to interference levels that could degrade the QoE.
Subsequently, NOCs are faced with the problem of finding trends within their wireless network related to varying signal strengths. Additionally, the varying signal strengths may be associated with dense population areas having low-quality performance. Thus, the QoE may depend on the location of the User Equipment (UE), e.g. mobile device, and time period when the UE device is being used.
Compounding the problem of locating low-quality performance is that wireless users, typically, provide a low response rate to quality assurance surveys that would identify locations with low-quality performance. Even if the wireless users provided responses to quality assurance surveys or provided customer complaints, operators of wireless networks would have to quickly diagnose the causes of the customer complaints through a customer care department, which would be laborious and time consuming. Additionally, there are the challenges to the NOC of prioritizing the customer complaints and/or the quality assurance survey. Furthermore, there are the challenges of properly prioritizing the complaints and/or survey results.
Also, there is a need to collect data from every component of the network that generates performance metrics, events, and alerts that can be transformed into actionable data that is deterministically relevant. Consequently, the large volume of data generated and collected from a plurality of network devices represents storage and computational complexities.